The Left has been in full panic mode since the election of President Trump, not least because he has the chance to remake the U.S. Supreme Court and set its course for the next 30 years.
His first appointment was Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, and now to replace retiring liberal Anthony Kennedy, he awaits the confirmation hearings and vote for Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Unsurprisingly, Kavanaugh sent the Left into a Trump Derangement seizure, and should another aging justice decide to retire, mass hysteria would likely be the result.
One justice, though, 85-year-old leftist Ruth Bader Ginsburg, vows to hang on until at least 2023.
Left Relieved
Ginsburg’s promise came after a performance of a play about her late friend Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, who died of a heart attack in 2016 at 79 years old.
“I’m now 85,” Ginsburg said, according to CNN. “My senior colleague, Justice John Paul Stevens, he stepped down when he was 90, so think I have about at least five more years.”
Ginsburg, the website Above The Law reported in January, has hired law clerks through at least 2020, but the word from Ginsburg over the weekend confirmed her plan to hang on, and relieved the leftists who worried she might retire before President Trump’s first term ends. Of course, they hope she lasts through a second Trump term if he is reelected.
As the Washington Post reported it:
“My heart stopped for a moment,” tweeted writer Wajahat Ali.
Dedicated RBG fans feared the worst. They refused to look up the news. They prayed. They offered their kidneys.
“I was on my way to the hospital to donate all my organs,” wrote another fan. “Please be alive, please be alive, please be alive …,” tweeted another.
Then, came a collective exhale. Her admirers soon realized that Ginsburg is very much alive, and that the news was that she does not plan on stepping down anytime soon.
Tweets joked that “you will pry this black robe out of my cold dead hands,” and that “the devil is working hard but RBG’s personal trainer is working harder.” Ginsburg works out regularly in the Supreme Court’s gym.
Anyway, in a second take, the Post reported that “Ginsburg set the goal posts for her retirement in a suspiciously convenient place for liberals: when Trump probably won’t be able to pick her replacement.”
And Ginsburg “doesn’t say only five years; she says ‘about at least five more years.’ That sounds as if she’s shooting for 2024.”
Radical Judicial Activist
The Left has reason to be happy, given the Clinton appointee’s radical view of the law.
She wrote the decision in 1996 that forced Virginia Military Institute to admit women, and wrote the radical dissent in the Hobby Lobby case, whereby the high court decided that the government, in this case via ObamaCare, could not force a closely held for-profit company to provide contraceptive coverage if it conflicts with owners’ religious beliefs.
Among the better-known excerpts are that “legions of women” wouldn’t get contraceptives if the government doesn’t force the issue, and that for-profit companies cannot be allowed the same latitude as religious employers because “workers who sustain the operations of those corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community.”
She claimed, dubiously, that “the cost of an IUD is nearly equivalent to a month’s full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage,” and that “approving some religious claims while deeming others unworthy of accommodation could be ‘perceived as favoring one religion over another,’ the very ‘risk the [Constitution’s] Establishment Clause was designed to preclude.’ ”
And Ginsburg does not merely view her job as judging the law impartially, a key reason the Left loves her. She is an activist for women’s rights, and when she didn’t get her way in the now-famous sex discrimination case against Goodyear, lobbied for legislation.
In Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., the plaintiff claimed she was paid less than men with the same qualifications. But the court decided against Ledbetter because the statute of limitations had passed.
“The facts of this case mixed her passion of federal procedure and gender discrimination,” the website reported of Ginsburg. “She broke with tradition and wrote a highly colloquial version of her dissent to read from the bench. She also called for Congress to undo this improper interpretation of the law in her dissent, and then worked with President Obama to pass the very first piece of legislation he signed, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, a copy of which hangs proudly in her office.”
Kavanaugh Fight
As for Kavanaugh, the Left went ballistic over the nomination, as The New American reported, and Senate Democrats have promised to examine every jot and title of everything Kavanaugh ever wrote. That would mean combing through millions of documents. The Left fears a reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in all 50 states.
That threat received a warning from Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said he’ll take the confirmation process into election season, which might prevent Democrats from going home to campaign, Politico reported, and hand the Democrats and their base a major, “demoralizing” defeat at election time.
The question is when another justice will retire, giving Trump a third chance to nominate a judge. The most likely retiree is Stephen Breyer, who will be 80 on August 15.
Photo of Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court of the United States
